If you’re reading this, you may be a woman. In that case, you probably want men to like you, and even if you don’t, you probably want someone to like you. Furthermore, as we traipse daintily down the yellow brick road of logical progression toward the Oz of me actually making a point, if you want someone to like you, you can take several approaches.

1) You can be startlingly good-looking. This is often not something that is up to you, as your bone structure is not something that you select from a catalog during puberty, but there are things that women do. Clothes, makeup, deodorant, and all manner of barbarically painful hair-removal techniques are used by women (you) to make men (us) want to have sexy times with you, or at least attempt to have sexy times you so that you can shut us down and feel good about yourself, then go home and not have sexy times. Which is apparently preferable. Regardless of whether you want sexy times, you want to feel like you have the option, and so you alter your physical appearance so that people will like you.

Unless it backfires horribly.

2) You can be an actually interesting person. This one, handily enough, is actually up to you. All you have to do is know about stuff, talk to people, smile occasionally, etc. In that case, men wanting sexy times will, upon approaching you, not have to force a smile while talking to you, because they will actually want to. If you are attractive, you can increase the number of men who approach you, but if you are then a vapid disgrace to the very concept of intelligence, he will leave. Some men will grit their teeth and try very hard to avoid stabbing you with a tiny cocktail sword because they really really want sexy times, but most will hate you in the process.

Now, an ideal situation would be someone who is both devastatingly attractive and fascinating as a person, but we’re a rare breed so don’t hold your breath. In all likelihood, you’re sort of average in both categories (that’s what “average” means), so your looks alone aren’t enough to carry you.

My point here is that most of you ladies out there probably think that your personality is of at least some slight importance.

Skechers disagrees.

Now, this ad’s not all bad. The use of an upside-down heart as an ass shape is kind of clever, the picture is very classy and artistic, and I have mentally extrapolated that I do heart her upside down heart. But that copy line? “Make your bottom half your better half”? Come on now. Besides being insulting to your intelligence and any non-physical aspect of who you are as a person, it’s even insulting to your boobs. One ad from Reebok actually says that it’ll “make your boobs jealous.” To clarify, this ad objectifies your ass so much that it would actually be less insulting if it objectified your chesticles as well. That’s quite an accomplishment.

Not only that, but this ad makes the same mistake that every single ad for these ass-toning shoes makes, and that’s that they’re using the wrong strategy. Everyone knows that if you want to advertise to men, you either use manly men that they want to be (Brett Favre, Isaiah Mustafa) or women that they want to be inside (any woman in an ad for alcohol). Advertising that shows exclusively asses (and I dare you to find an ad for this kind of shoe that has a woman’s face in it) is not for women, IT’S FOR MEN. Women don’t want to stare at other women’s asses and legs, and it’s not just the notoriously immature people who do ads for Skechers that haven’t picked up on that. Here’s one from Reebok.

If you had an ass like that, you’d take out the recycling barely clad too.

The people who stare drooling at an ad like that and actually want what’s in it are men, and what they want is not the shoes. Or the plastic bottles.

So now you’re left with ads that do not appeal to the target audience, but to people who want to bone the target audience. That’s not uncommon either. Electric razor ads are often directed to women, especially around Christmas, because men won’t buy fancy razors for themselves. Diamond ads are pointed blatantly at men so they’ll buy them for their lady friends. And so on. But if a man buys these shoes for a woman, he’s not saying that he loves her or that he supports her jogging habit, he’s saying that her ass is not as good as he would like it to be.

Merry Christmas! Also, I hate your face.

So let’s recap. Skechers thinks you are stupid, and enjoy having your personality and intelligence belittled. They also think that you care deeply about the shape of your ass. Furthermore, they would like to inform you that the ass you care so deeply about is not really that good, and they’d really like it if your boyfriend or husband shared that opinion.

Such nice people . . .

The only way this could be worse is if the shoes caused all this idiocy and didn’t actually do anything, which oh hey, they don’t. You can click through to that link if you want, but the gist of it is that the original study on the effectiveness of the shoe was done on only five people and never peer-reviewed, they’re so unstable that unless you’re just walking they actually stand a chance of injuring you, and that the benefits (if there are any) probably come from you walking more briskly because you think you should.

That said, apparently four out of five women want better asses, and the EasyTone is the most popular shoe Reebok has sold in years, so fuck it. I hate the ads, but they’re working.